Hi, I'm Nick. I'm a learning science researcher interested in how we can use educational technology to make us better citizens.

Research

We build and test adaptive online tutoring systems that teach students how to engage in productive civil discourse and recognize their own biases. We use these tutoring systems to research how political beliefs impact our ability to think rationally about an argument's validity, and believe an intelligent computer agent might be able to help us recognize and mitigate the cognitive biases that reinforce information bubbles and political tribalism.

We've found that participants have more trouble identifying informal logical fallacies in arguments that align with their own political views. But we also found that this bias seems to disappear (at least inside our tutor) with practice.